www.aaronshep.com/rt

www.literacyconnections.com/ReadersTheater.php

www.TeachingBooks.net is a terrific online resource for teaching books in the classroom.  They will soon have available online videos of one of our performances, which includes scenes from books by Avi, Sharon Creech, Walter Dean Myers, and Sarah Weeks.  Also included is a mini-documentary with helpful hints about using readers theatre with students.

The paperback editions of the following books contain readers theatre scripts:  

Heartbeat, by Sharon Creech So B. It, by Sarah Weeks Poppy’s Return, by Avi Jumping the Scratch, by Sarah Weeks

You may want to try adapting scenes yourself. It is easy and fun to adapt scenes from any book into script form.  Our experience has been that students enjoy the process of adapting scenes, assigning parts, rehearsing readings, and performing.  They seem to relish that they do not have to memorize their parts: in readers theatre, everyone reads from his own script.   Not only does readers theatre help bring a book alive in an intimate way, but it also offers terrific practice in oral reading and expression.

Following are some suggestions and hints you might find useful:

• Scenes with a lot of dialogue make for lively interaction and are often
  easiest to adapt as readers theatre.
• Narrative parts­ can be broken up into smaller passages and assigned
  to different readers.  Even a single sentence can be split between
  readers for dramatic effect.
• If choosing a monologue, two or more readers can split up the part.
• Picture books are often fun to adapt, as are short scenes from novels.
• Scripts can be as short or as long as you like, but we’ve found that scenes that run between three and ten minutes work best.
• Our texts are not sacred.  Feel free to delete parts which don’t play well
  dramatically, or to merge several scenes together, or add words which
  clarify or further dramatize the scene.
• Although the teacher might like to model the process of choosing and adapting scenes, preparing scripts and performing them, students can soon take on all of these steps and should be encouraged to add their own ideas
  and insights.
• There are no sacred rules in readers theatre; have fun with it, experiment!

**One final note:  teachers sometimes question issues of copyright and permissions.  Our feeling is this:  feel free to do what you like in adapting our texts.  You do not need to seek permission if your performances are for school use only. Your scripts should be prefaced with credit to the original author and title, for example:  This script is adapted from Poppy's Return, by Avi.  For any commercial use, you must contact the publisher(s) for permission.